UGC is hot, hot, hot right now. Roblox is on track to pay out half a billion USD to creators - annually - and never has it been more possible for young, individual creators to make a meaningful living as “game developers.” But is Roblox the only place for such creators?
HiberWorld, a platform that's empowering anyone to build and share their own 3D worlds, is trying to change that by making making it as easy possible for anyone, at any age, and anywhere in the world to build their own virtual worlds. HiberWorld has already achieved some impressive milestones, reaching 1 million worlds in 2021, 5 million in 2023, and 6.5 million at latest count. Underlying everything is Hiber3D, Hiber’s web engine, which is trying to make it as easy as possible for anyone to build their own HiberWorld.
In this episode your host, Niko Vuori, sits down with Hiber’s Chief Strategy Officer Sean Kauppinen to discuss Hiber’s story, what growth strategies it has used to grow, and what differentiates it from Roblox.
Check out Hiber on the web. You can find Sean Kauppinen on LinkedIn. For more information about some of the topics discussed in this episode, check out Dive Analytics for outsourced games BI, Nir Eyal’s excellent book “Hooked” about building habit-forming products, and The New York Times’ “Hard Fork” podcast for all things tech and particularly their excellent coverage of developments in AI.
We’d also like to thank nSure.ai for making this episode possible! In the gaming industry, protecting revenue from fraudsters is crucial. That’s where nSure.ai comes in. As a proven industry leader, nSure.ai provides scalable payment fraud prevention that’s not just effective but tailored specifically to your needs. To learn more, visit https://www.nsure.ai/contact
This transcript is machine-generated, and we apologize for any errors.
Niko: Hello and welcome to the Naavik Podcast. I'm your host, Niko Vuori. Today we are venturing into the hot world of user generated content and the metaverse. We're talking to the chief strategy officer of Hiber, A platform that's empowering anyone to build and share their own 3D worlds. If you've ever heard of Roblox, then you'll have a pretty good idea what Hiber is all about.
But it has a twist, of course. And if you haven't heard specifically of Hiber yet, you likely will. HiberWorld, Hiber's metaverse, has already achieved some impressive milestones, reaching 1 million worlds in 2021 and quintupling to 5 million in 2023. Underlying everything is Hiber 3D, which is Hiber's web engine, and it's trying to make it as easy as possible for anyone to build their own Hiber worlds.
Without further ado, today I'm excited to welcome Sean Kauppinen, Chief Strategy Officer at Hiber, to the show. Sean, welcome to the pod.
Sean: Thank you, Niko, and thanks for the proper Finnish pronunciation of my last name. I've been dying to get a Finnish guest on the pod so I can
Niko: I've been dying to get a Finnish guest on the pod so I can whip out some Finnish but turns out you only know the bad words
Sean: So I'm U.S. born, but my father's family is Finnish and out of the four potential last names I could have gotten, I got the one that made it hard going through school.
Niko: Of course. Yeah. Yeah. You know what? It's okay. It's all good. But once you work in Sweden quite a bit of the time, right? So you should be okay there.
Sean: I do. I've been traveling back and forth for the last five years, every couple of weeks. It's been quite the journey.
Niko: That's, that's home territory with a name like that. So you're all good there. Okay. With that out of the way, let's get into the episode and Sean, I do always like to start with the background of our guests.
So tell us more about who you are and your journey through the games industry.
Sean: Yeah. Started out in 1995 when I got out of school with a film degree which. Of course, it's hard to get into the film industry back then because everything was unionized. I found that I couldn't get in and ended up working in a mail room at an investor relations firm and started working my way up and went to companies like 3DFX when they were putting out some of the first 3D graphic stuff.
I worked for Bleem, which was an emulator company that Sony did not like because you could play PlayStation games on your PC and eventually you're sick of Dreamcast and then did some time at Ubisoft and third party publishing Sony online in international product PR, and then did some agency things and ultimately ended up becoming a consultant of my own with studios all around the world, helping them go from their formation through their exits and all the things that come in between and the CEO of a couple companies along the way.
It was early in game advertising back in 06, early in progressive download in 2008. Pretty much early to most things, but a lot of experience in free to play and those types of business models. And when I saw Hiber, I looked at this and said, wow, this is an incredible way for anyone to access something that is like Roblox and saw that the model would ultimately evolve into something with a user economy.
So that UGC really. Really it hit home and I think we're probably even a little bit early on that too.
Niko: Okay. So a lot of experience in the industry i've seen a lot done a lot and it's always the best kind of guests that we like who have that perspective on the industry and you know i've seen some of these cycles happened before and I appreciate that you're even considering that maybe we're even A bit early to the UGC revolution there, especially as it's part of the in game economy.
Okay. So let's talk a little bit about Hiber then. What is Hiber? What does it do? And I know you have a Hiber World, which is where all of these experiences happen like in Roblox. How do you experience that?
Sean: So founded seven years ago, Hiber is a company, it's, we're based in Sweden and Mattias Johansson and Michael Wooten Porsche, the two people who came together with this crazy idea of, wow, things are getting easy to put stuff on the web.
And what if everybody could use some kind of web tools to create worlds and 3D spaces? And Mattias is a visionary thinker. I think I'm like a Willy Wonka. And, you could say, no that's too early. That's crazy. But his brain would go to it. And eventually the market's going to hit where his brain goes.
So the idea was take the web and utilize it as a tool to get everyone the opportunity to participate in creation because everybody has that creativity, whether it be, they want to paint, they want to write, they want to make music. And the new, the current generation, they want to make games, but they do find it daunting if, Roblox is absolutely the most amazing platform out there.
For people to actually play and participate it's a different kind of social experience these days where kids are experiencing everything, but it's impossible for the average person to create because you have to learn Lua. And there's so many people that come to our platform saying, I wish I could make a game.
And when I found I have a world, I can go in with no code. And start clicking things and placing items and adding gameplay elements. And I think that's where it really starts to, to hit home. Okay, if Roblox ever gets to the point where they could do what we're doing, I think they're going to be even bigger because, that's an opportunity.
Niko: Yeah, absolutely. It's actually interesting to say the difficulty of building. We had Joe Franks from Gamefam on the pod just last year, I think, not that long ago, and they've built a pretty Compelling business, essentially being the experts in building those experiences and those games specifically for brands, of course, but it just goes to show that even big brands with big budgets, they don't really have the resources to go and do this.
And so the average person who wants to build one of these experiences it's going to be daunting. It's going to be difficult. And so that's your 3d. That's Hiber 3D, right? Is what you're describing. So how exactly is it easier? How is it better? How is it smoother? How is it more streamlined?
Sean: What I'm really describing there is the Hiber World part of it. So Hiber World is the application of the Hiber 3D stuff. And a quick shout out to Joe and the GameFan people over there. We actually share an investor in Convoy Ventures. I got a pretty good view of where the market's going. So they've put some nice investments out there, back to us and back then.
That Sonic, the Hedgehog game that they built for for Roblox is pretty awesome.
Niko: It's killer. It's amazing. And then the Barbie stuff they did with the Dreamhouse in tied to the movie release, like that's really hard to do with big brands and like having to work with release dates and schedules.
Like they've, they're doing some nice work and what they do really well.
Sean: Yeah, I'm super impressed with how they've been building stuff. And I think there's a lot of companies starting to pop up and do stuff for UEFN. So the unity people out there, no one challenges. Discovery because here's my 28 digit code.
Type this in and you'll come to the world. There's no real logical way to do that search stuff, but somebody who's going to solve that and build a new distribution channel out there and have some solid money coming in.
Niko: Yeah, absolutely. All right. So let's talk a little bit then about what makes Hiber, what's the, like, how do you differentiate from Roblox?
You started seven years ago. Obviously Roblox was already pretty mature by that point. So you always see looking at Roblox and saying, Hey, we can do this. We see this where it's going and we can do something that's different and that's going to differentiate us. And that's going to make it easier.
Easy seems to be the thing that you guys are leaning on. How is it easier?
Sean: Easier because it doesn't involve a few things. One, it doesn't have to have a big download, right? We have a Hiber 3D engine is under five megabytes. It runs in a web browser. It's a seat bus engine. And it can reach people anywhere.
So if you're talking about emerging markets, if you're in Africa, if you're in parts of Asia, parts of Latin America, and you would love to be a creator, this is an opportunity to get in and start doing that without downloading hundreds of megabytes or gigs or having to even use apps. Because in a lot of places, especially like India, a family might share a phone and that install storage space is really at a premium.
And When you're sharing it with the five to seven member family. And you want to be able to just access stuff very quickly. That's probably one of the things that we, our time to find our TTF, as we say, is somewhere between five and seven seconds. And it almost mirrors exactly the attention span of gen alpha.
Niko: So how true is that? I got two kids as well. So yeah, I know what that is.
Sean: The Hiber World experience that you can go to hiberworld.com. You can see the 6. 5 million games now.
Niko:Oh, wow. Okay. All right. My numbers are out of date. Yeah that's good.
Yeah. 1. 2 million traders so far. And we haven't really done a ton of promotion. So I think that's a key. We kept that kind of lean, but the true thing about Hiber World is it's an example of what anybody could do with Hiber 3d, you can take any, you can take the engine and you can build a world. And you can embed it on any website because it's it runs on the existing HTML rails of the internet, which is absolutely awesome.
If you're a brand think about, the Tommy Hilfiger sites and you want to actually have an experience and you can build, but a Tommy Hilfiger experience right on the website, right next to the things you're selling. But also because it's web, you can actually within those worlds do connections to both 3D virtual and real world items.
So you could actually go and make a purchase or get a digital item. Now the whole digital thing, right? Get the digital item and then Amazon delivers the actual physical thing in the mail tomorrow or later today.
Niko: Yeah, that's wild. That's wild. Okay. So those are really compelling things. We're digging into some of the components in a little bit.
But let's talk a little bit about do you have any big hit games or experiences on Hiber or in Hiber World? Are there any kind of trends that you're seeing in terms of what's resonating? What's working?
Sean: I think the probably one of the biggest things that we've had on there is we did a partnership with Rovio and Ready Player Me, and we built some avatars out and experience around Angry Birds.
So you can go in and it's not the actual Angry Birds experience, but you can actually fire one of the birds at some things. And it's more of a platform. So I think what we find is that our audience loves to go in and experience the brand. It was like, Oh my God, they have angry birds. This is so cool.
That one is pretty big. We've got some variety in there. We've got racing games. We've got games where you can fly like Superman. There's a battle Royale mode. There's all sorts of things, even side scrollers that are starting to pop up. But the real. Opportunity here is professional game developers at some point starting to look at this and we see some huge trends in the market that I think are going to attract some people to what we have to offer because we have this incredible showcase piece with Hiber World.
But there's also going to be some larger games that are coming out in the next year.
Niko: Once you get the audience, it's the flywheel starts going, right? So it's hard to build that initial audience. But once you've got it, then it starts to feed on itself. So we'll get into that in a little bit as well.
Okay. So who is the audience? Who are these developers? And then who are the users, the players, the people who are experiencing?
Sean: I would say that there's very few professional developers on the platform today. And they're mostly the people who are, Exploring Hiber 3d teams as a transition for either unity projects or on real or something that they've built where they want to open it up and do some UGC stuff with the community.
And then the majority are people who just have this creative streak and they're like, I want to build a game. I want to build an experience. And they just went and started building. I think one of the, one of the coolest stories, which comes out about a horrible tragedy when Kobe Bryant passed away We had 25, 30 different worlds that people had built as memorials to Kobe and his daughter.
And I thought that was just amazing that people can take a 3D space and not make it a game, but almost, it's a tribute space where they could go and they could talk about it. And that's, I think, what some of the true power is within UGC. It's. It's being in the moment and it doesn't have to be the greatest quality content, but it's relevant in the moment and then that time and that people could have the discussion and then they can move on to the other things that are in their life.
But maybe it gives them some closure or some opportunity to express that and share with others in a way that you can't do on Snapchat or Instagram or Facebook. Even though it is permanent and it's there it doesn't have to be permanent, right? It could be the thing that you put out there and you switch it back to private and nobody sees it again.
Niko: Yeah, so that's interesting actually. It's almost like you could have an instant creation. Because you're so fast, that's your angle, you can react more quickly and do these kinds of things. It would be very difficult. Do that on Roblox or certainly on any other game engine. Does that then mean that these experiences are intended to be short lived?
Or is it more of a case of people are trying to build things for the long term, but it's just not quite there yet. The same experience as it might be on Roblox, but even on Roblox, they don't last forever, these experiences. So curious to hear like, how long do people play for? How long do these worlds last for?
What's the kind of churn, if you will? I don't know if you use that term internally, but what's the churn through these worlds?
Sean: Ah, I would say when you have a world that it's popular, like if you go to Roblox and rob the bank, Obby is a huge world that they have. It's got tens of millions of plays.
Might should be into the hundreds of millions at this point. Somebody who goes and builds something like that on our platform and it'll get millions of plays and it'll stay pretty relevant. One of the fun things is everything on the platform is multiplayer, so as long as somebody's playing it, it'll keep that session open and it stays for a few minutes after.
Even they've jumped out. So the top games tend to not turn over as fast. So if it really is a hit, you'll see 20, 30, 50 people playing every minute of every hour of every day. And that's something that I think Angry Birds stayed on the top of our chart for 10 months.
Niko: Okay. Okay. So people are playing for real amounts of time.
Okay. The developers, let's talk about that side. Are they, there's 6. 5 million worlds. I'm presuming it's not 6. 5 million developers. I'm sure there's some developers who are building multiple worlds. What kind of behavior do you see there on the developer side? Do they make one world and then they're, They're done.
They're just experimenting. Or is it a case of oh, wow, this, they made one and it was fun to do. And now they make a second one. It's even better. And then they're like serial entrepreneurs are quotes, if you will, inside the inside the Hiber world.
Sean: So the user journey is usually the people come in and they'll play a game and the, wow, this is really cool.
And then I'll see that little create button up at the top. What is this? And they click on that. And you don't actually have to be registered as a user on the platform to play or even to create. You do to publish. So once people go through and they play around the first time and they'll publish something, if they get a positive reaction from other people in the community, Hey, this is really awesome, really loved what you did here, that feedback really feeds into the cycle and they'll go on, they'll build something with a little more effort and start building some friendships on the platform and then helping promote other people where they like their games or saying, Hey, can you check out what I've built?
I really love that you did this. And you have some creators out there that have built hundreds of games and you have other people who build one and it's, a three second experience. You go in, you hit the goal, you're done, but it is, it's pretty empowering to be able to go in and build something and then say, look what I built.
So we know a lot of people have sent those worlds as like a Mother's Day card, almost Mom, look, I built you a world. It's a game and I know you love that. I'm playing games all the time, here, check this out.
Niko: I'm a creator. Look, mom, I'm a creator.
Sean: Yeah, and there's stuff in there that says mom, right?
Niko: So yeah, that's cool. The future of greeting cards. Okay, look out hallmark. Apparently you're here first. Okay, so the demographics of these developers, you mentioned developing countries a few times. I'm gonna talk about mobile in a second. Actually, mobile devices. I haven't got to that yet, but we're gonna talk about that in just a little bit.
But what are the demographics of these developers? Where do they land? Are they very young? Are they children just experimenting for the first time? Are they from emerging economies, emerging countries where maybe they don't have fast internet? Like you said, they can't download a multi hundred times. Megabyte binary and start playing around with that.
Like what's the demographic split?
Sean: I would say it's about 50, 50, 50 percent is US based and the other 50 percent is emerging markets, whether it be India, Philippines, other places in where they don't have the faster internet. And we, the ways that kind of plays out is if you look at the school day, Kids will go and they start playing and they'll create at lunchtime and then after school they'll play, I don't know if it's until pickup.
And then when they get back home, they have other options at least within the Hiber World universe. Maybe they do want to play Roblox or some Minecraft or Fortnight. But. The majority of the time is when people are at or around school time because they can get in so fast. And, even if it's like you got 10 minutes before school starts, you jump out with some friends and we found that one of the fun distribution parts here is people will take a link and start building and we'll throw it into a Google Doc because schools use the Google Doc system or the.
All of those places, people can share it and they can co create in real time. So you could have 20 people in the same place building something. And, they're sharing messages behind the teacher's back. What's the answer to this? They're building math problems inside a world. But the overall demographic is, it is mostly people within that 13 to 18 group.
I'd say that because you can't really track people who are under the age of 13. And pretty much everybody who's. I think the age of 13, I think on most platforms, just says they're 13. The majority of the group. And then you do get some people who are a little bit older. And some developers who are trying to do something that maybe it's a lifelong dream and they're in their twenties and thirties and say, this is a great early access point.
And maybe they go on to use the coding version of what we have or. It's a lot of people who have unfulfilled dreams of making a game, and it's the game that they always wish they had. Hopefully we're an inspirational piece in that journey that they can go and at least start.
Niko: Yeah, no, absolutely.
It's you never forget your first coding experience as a, you always go back as an adult if you enter into the game industry and you always look back and say, Oh, those were the days when I was just messing around with my, Commodore 64 or whatever it was, 10, 10 print, Sean, 20 go to 10.
There you go. Exactly. So that is awesome. On the flip side, catering towards primarily children younger children, obviously has its drawbacks. Roblox spends at. Absolute monstrous amount of money on safety and security. And rightly content moderation as well. And of course, monetization, we'll get that question later on in the episode as well.
So let's start with the moderation and the safety aspect of it. How are you approaching that? What's the challenge there?
Sean: So we, you're going to love this. We've actually been doing AI for about five and a half years. So everyone else is talking about AI now, but. One of the first things we did is we partnered up with another local Swedish company to help build out some AI models for content creation.
What that does is it deals with 99 plus percent of the problems that you run into on the system. They were actually eventually bought by Reddit. But because of the way we set things up, we own the model and walked out with some really great tools and and some content moderation pieces that just takes care of a lot of the problems and the community does a great job kind of self policing.
And we have very little actual moderators that are human that have to go in and deal with this. And I have a extensive background in, in MMO games, 20 plus MMOs over the years. Everything from EverQuest to Star Wars, Galaxies, Lord of the Rings Online, Age of Conan. And the funny thing is, when you're dealing with a bit of a younger audience, they're more exploratory in how and what they can get away with.
And I would say a little less sophisticated than when you get that 35 year old, angry, Person who just had a road rage incident, driving home, and now they're going to go take it out on a community.
Niko: Yes. Oh that's good to hear. And that the AI tool, that's very cool. I presuming Roblox has access to something similar.
It could have built their own, but, and yet they spend, they just announced their earnings. I'm sure you guys poured over them, but that is still such a massive part of their cost structure is. So it's fascinating that you were able to kind of air quotes, get away with a lighter touch and yet still be effective.
Sean: I think it's, it's also because of the scale. They have so many daily active users and, I on one level, I throw respect at them all the time. I think they, they built the most amazing thing. It's taken a long time. It is very expensive to do that, but they're doing it the right way.
That's what works for that size of a community. They need to have people in different languages and different time zones so that stuff doesn't develop into those larger problems. But it's probably also because it besides the community, a bad actor or somebody who's gonna try and do something bad.
It's going to go where there's a lot more people where they can blend in. So we do get away with some things, not having as many people. I'm sure if this thing starts to really scale we will also have to go and invest more into the human side of it. But for now, it's working.
Niko: Yeah. Arguably a good problem to have, still a problem, but a good problem to have. I love those problems where you have to spend a bunch of money because you're making a bunch. Yes. Yes. But nonetheless, the, that scaling can be very challenging. And I think a lot of companies have, I'm not wishing this upon you, of course, and I wish you all the success, but that's the point where I think a lot of companies, especially those serving children, that's where they hit a, an inflection point and they either.
Fight through, which Roblox of course was able to do. Fortnight, the epic, there's numerous examples, but there's many more examples where they have failed. Either because it was a, felt like a fad cause it was like the kids grew out of it, or because of the scaling issue with moderation and safety and security and just one bad actor, one bad news story, that's, the death knell.
Sean: I was there for the original EverQuest stories about online addiction, if you look at online games, they become almost a microcosm of, and a reflection of normal society. You have people who meet and get married. You have people who actually pass away in real life, and they have memorials and games.
You have, the community literally is just like a regular community. And that's what people Don't think about but in your average community, and you don't want to think about this on a daily basis, but there's some pretty horrible people out there. So if your community gets large enough, you're going to have those people.
But for the most part, just like your neighbors, if somebody's breaking into your house, they're going to call the cops, right? There, they're not going to be like I really don't like my neighbor. You want to protect your property value at the very least, you'd be like, it's not good to have crime.
So I think if we started to look at online communities and said, they are just like real world, you could see how a good community with good neighbors. Becomes a place where you want to hang out.
Niko: Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if property values in the metaverse are quite the same as they are in the real world.
At least not anymore. Maybe they were in the height of the crypto boom when other side plots were selling for hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in ETH. But we can talk web three too. Yeah I'm with you on that. Okay. Let's shift gears a little bit. That was a lot about the users and the developers and who is the community you're serving?
And I think that is really important to understand. Let's talk more about kind of the tech side and how you're evolving. You started on the web and you still talk about it as your web engine. But I know you are moving heavily into mobile, obviously as this everyone, and they need to be talk a little bit more about that, especially on the creator side, on the developer side what can you do on mobile parity with web or absolutely.
Sean: That's one of the beautiful things here. I think we are the only, or if we're not the only, we're one of the only technologies that actually will run on any mobile browser, including Safari on iPhones, even Safari. Apple does a lot of things because they really do want people to use the App Store Ecosystem and for a very long time, it's been a fantastic distribution portal and I think over the last year and a half or a couple of years, it's become a little more difficult for the average company to really be competitive as margins are 30 percent there and you have a If you're going to use Unity 6, because the version you're on is going to be deprecated and you will no longer be able to make updates.
You're going to be paying them 2. 5 percent if you're really a successful thing. So now 32. 5 percent of your Business is going to third parties of really for a little bit of distribution at this point, when cloud costs have gotten so cheap, you could deliver, 100 meg product for a penny it's so why would you pay 30 percent revenue share and then 2.
5 percent to another platform in perpetuity? It seems. Maybe the models should change and absolute props to the Epic team over there who've done some great things in in Europe in general we tend to be a little more consumer friendly than the U S so they do make rules that do benefit people like being able to access payment systems on the web, where you might be able to get a little bit more because Publishers slash developers not paying the same percentage.
Maybe they're paying 6 percent or 8 percent versus 30.
Niko: Well, that's a whole we could spend. We've done multiple episodes on the epic guys going after Apple and Differences between Europe and the U S and and Doug, let me say, we're a longtime developer here. We've been working on mobile in particular since the early days of mobile.
And we just hate giving Google every single time. It's off the top. It's it's crazy. Can you do it on net revenue? Yeah, exactly. With no, no notion of what is your actual cost? That's part of it. Again, if you go to look at the roadblocks financials, that's a big part of their problems.
Like they just, they would be profitable. They would be quite profitable if they didn't have to pay that. Damn, cut up the top, before anything else it's madness.
Sean: If you want to delve into that for just a moment, if you look at Roblox and say, if Roblox did a direct to consumer offering at this point, they're big enough and their brand's big enough.
Why do they have to be in an app store?
Niko: They're Roblox. So that's right. Maybe they're getting to that point now. Maybe they are getting to that point. I think they are. I think they've surpassed
Sean: Like the equivalence of Facebook for games. At least for the generation that's playing on their gen alpha Gen Z.
It makes a ton of sense for them eventually to have a business model where they direct to the consumer.
Niko: Completely agreed. Okay. Let's talk about back to Hiber again here. We've talked a lot about robots. Obviously it's a great confidence. There's a reason we do that.
And obviously we have a lot of respect for what they've done paved the way for this kind of business. They've had most, not most of their success. That's unfair, but they've had a lot of success, especially recently because of their scale. They've been able to track a lot of brands companies like a game fam and Joe over there, building Sonic, the hedgehog speed room simulator, Mattel, Barbie dream house.
The list goes on. Stuff with the NBA. They've done virtual concert. They've done almost it all by now. And that is part of the appeal for, the people visiting is Oh, are these cool experiences from the real world that I recognize and are now in the in the metaverse. So you mentioned Tommy Hilfiger, I think earlier on, I think that was a partnership you did.
Is that something you guys are working on actively as well? Is that your kind of bread and butter revenue generation? Because again, Monetizing younger children is quite difficult. They don't have credit cards to whip out of their pockets and pay you, even if there is no 30 percent off top. Curious to hear a little bit about the business model and specifically with the lens on some of these brand partnerships.
Sean: Yeah. So the business model has been primarily focused on licensing of the engine. So we've done some of that free to play experimentation. What we realize is. The majority of the audience, like you said, doesn't have that credit card. And we don't have a subscription model, which if you're doing a subscription like Roblox, you've got a great set up because they got to go ask the parents once, and then everybody just has to behave and do their chores.
And then, it's set on 4. 99 for infinity. That's the dream model for a consumer side platform. And it's also why our model is focused more on. Larger developers or people. I think we're more competitive kind of with the unity than we are with a Roblox. So I actually sent the other day, I'd rather try and get 1 million from one customer than 1 from a million customers, because there's so much more work in getting that buck from everybody.
Even if you were a paid app now, so yeah, I don't know where I'm going with this other than the business side of it with the brands we've worked with a bunch of brands and a lot of them have come through our partners at ready player me who are just, they're fantastic to work with.
So a shout out to them for the most part, those are more brand activations and people trying to get exposure for what they're doing. We do have something I'll tease a little bit. That's going to be massive with the greatest football team in the entire world football soccer coming out sometime in the next month or so.
So keep an eye on
Niko: that. My greatest team in the world. Everyone's going to have a slightly different definition here. So I'm a big soccer football fan. I watched it probably a league on NSBC and Peacock. Let's make sure we're talking about the same team here. Liverpool.
Sean: I'm not, no not going to actually say who it is, but it's not a rectum either, even though we'd love to work somewhere between Liverpool.
Niko: I don't know if Liverpool is a, is the best in the world anywhere, especially after Jurgen Klopp has gone. But anyway, that's a whole different conversation. I've been following them. I'm not from the UK. I'm from Finland. Obviously. Yes. Everyone knows, but I've been following Liverpool from the very very beginning.
So before it was cool. So just so everyone knows, I didn't jump on the bandwagon with the Jurgen Klopp era. Okay, let's talk a little bit about that revenue a little deeper on that because brand stuff and those kinds of things, activations, like yes, it's easier to do easier. Of course, getting money out of brands is not easy, right?
But it's also lumpy, right? Like to your point about the Roblox subscription or even kind of IAP. My son is 11. He's a very good fortnight and brawl stars player. He gets the battle pass every time it comes out. And as long as he does his chores, he requests it. I pay it for it. Even though that's not subscription revenue, that's also fairly predictable when you've got the pedal pass concept going on it's very lumpy when you're doing brand activations.
So talk to me a little bit more about that. Like that's the challenge with that model is yes, you can get bigger checks cut, but then where's the next one coming from, right?
Sean: Yeah, so so the brand activation thing, if you look at the model, how it can work, it's the same model that retailers use, right?
So if you were an affiliate for Amazon or an affiliate for walmart or targets, they pay between, I think, four and 7 percent for lead generation. Ultimately, if somebody goes and buy something through your platform. So if there's a brand and they're Popped up on, say, Hiber world or even embedded on their site for this specific brand.
And there's a purchase made a lot of times that's a better model for them is that it's a success based versus paying a bunch of money up front. I know during the pandemic stage when everything was going crazy and to the right. Yeah, people had free money, basically, and they were investing in everything.
A lot of companies had metaverse divisions, and they were like, Yeah, this is, it's all going to be 3D. It's all going to be here in two years. A lot of those metaverse divisions got laid off about a year and a half to two years ago. So it was even before some of the stuff that happened in the regular game industry really going a bit sideways.
Brands already figured that out, and they're like, No, it's not going to generate money in the short term. So
Niko: Stop investing. Yeah. I, so to, to that point then, like, where do you see that going then? What are you still focused on that as your primary source of revenue? I know you said you've got this big activation coming with the world's best football team.
I'm excited to see what that is. But what are your other sources of revenue? What are you chasing?
Sean: What's coming to monetize that big opportunity in the market that we see is there's people who are paying a lot of money for other engines right now, and those engines are going to be charging even more money.
And on top of that, there's that 30 percent going to different app stores. So if you have the ability to look at the entire market, take a step back, you have a successful game. Maybe you're in the top 150, 200 titles on mobile. How do we get around this? How do we start building that direct to consumer connection?
Because everybody's looking at the DTC payment providers. And the distribution part is inexpensive. So if you can start making 20 percent more revenue, at least by going direct to those consumers and your brand is big enough, it makes a lot of logical sense. So there's a lot of people in the strategy divisions within large companies that are starting to reach out to us and say, this seems like a really interesting opportunity to keep a lot more of that revenue.
And kind of shore up some of those deficits that, that some of those public companies have. So if you're like, it's a, you're a Roblox and it's going to go, okay, if we're still losing money, how do we fix this? We need to figure out a way to make more, or we need to cut our costs. And then people don't want to cut costs because then you lose innovation, you lose speed.
So you have to figure out how to actually keep more of your dollars. And I think that's the big opportunity for us in the market right now is. Yeah. These larger companies come in saying, Hey, you just built this amazing. Engine over the last seven years. No one is crazy enough to be building an engine these days.
That's, that is true. Maybe we'll work with you. We have 7, 000 less people than our closest competitor.
Niko: Yeah. Yeah, totally. Totally. Okay. That brings us back to the flywheel then. And these brands are coming to you because you're able to post, big numbers. I don't know if you've announced your DAU or MAU.
Do you share those numbers? I know you share the number of worlds, but we will say hundreds of thousands of MAUs and the tens of thousands.
Sean: Like I said, we're really not doing any marketing, so it's all organic.
Niko: And that's what I was going to say. So the flywheel now is you've done this all organically.
Are you at a stage now where you think you could accelerate that flywheel by trying to market more aggressively to either consumers, the players, the users, or more aggressively to developers, creators, more professional studios that can level up the experience is like, what's the next lever for you?
You can't be going word of mouth forever.
Sean: I think we could and, but here's the way I look at that and how we look at it as a company. If you look at something like Roblox, Roblox is a destination. If you look at something like Fortnite, it's a destination. Minecraft is ultimately a destination.
What we have is something that's embeddable on your own website. So if people are already looking for Levi's or Coca Cola or your brand, Even your video game. They're coming to your website, they still, people still go to websites. They do. So the idea would be why not put the community and the content where the community is at versus paying a third party to build their numbers and build their community to send your users somewhere else.
So that's the big pitch here, is if we're gonna scale things, we're gonna scale it on the sites of the people who will partner with us rather than on the Hiber world site. You can put something on Hiber World and they embedded on Tommy Hilfiger dot com and you'll get an audience from both places.
But the goal will be that the primary audience is the Hilfiger fans who are going through and having this awesome experience and go, Oh, this is cool. I wish I had.
Niko: And they don't care that it's Hiber. They don't care that it's Hiber World. They just care that it's Tommy Hilfiger or Leroy.
Sean: Exactly right, exactly. And that's why I think that Hiber World brand ultimately is an important, it's literally, it's like steam, right? No one goes Oh yeah, it's on Steam. Everyone goes, okay, it seems an account in a wallet I have that connects the things.
Niko: Okay. This question then may or may not be relevant, but I'm gonna ask it anyway, because you obviously do have a bunch of creators who are creating stuff and not monetizing directly very heavily.
Roblox, obviously they just, again, going back to the earnings it's hot off the press. It was like last week, I think they, they put it out there. So I certainly poured over their earnings. I always do. They're now paying their creators over half a billion dollars a year.
Which is amazing. That's fantastic. They've created, real entrepreneurs, children in their teens, or even younger are like able to build real businesses, early on. And that's amazing. And I just have so much respect and kudos for what they've done there. And that's obviously feeding the flywheel for them and as always has done.
So curious to hear, do you have a version of this? Do you share revenue with creators, given that you don't? Generate maybe so much IAP and it's more brands. I like it. I'm presuming it's a hell of a lot harder to try and parse out. What would we give? What's a fair rev share, if you will.
Sean: So we haven't generated enough revenue on the UGC side to really have it be material yet.
Yes, there, there is a way to do that. Our view on that has always been that the creator would have the majority. Because they're the one doing the work. At the same time, we've got to cover our back end costs and some development fees. But, that's not even 30%. It's smaller percentages.
But that's again, huge respect for Roblox and what they're doing. They have a massive overhead. Even a half a billion dollars off of several billion dollars for their revenue, they're covering their costs. And they are really doing some awesome stuff for a lot of people out there. I can actually make a living as a Roblox developer.
That's fantastic. You can't do that on Hiber today. There's no, actually not a Hiber robot Hiber 3d. You potentially cut this, then you could just own the revenue. And we do know some people who are doing some fun things like connecting to Shopify and connecting to Amazon and other platforms to take those items, convert them through some tools and put them in as 3d objects.
And then you can go in and there's a store. So you want to sell your brand of coffee or you want to sell whatever. Eventually I think this becomes a not just a game platform, but a mom and pop serve yourself type of 3D experience that you put on a website. And what we didn't talk about yet is we've been working with Google and the cloud people over there on some AI tools over the last year plus.
In a half almost, so you have the ability to actually go in and prompt what you want the world to look like, and it'll start setting it up, and then you can move objects around afterwards. You can also take a picture off your desktop, upload it, and it'll actually turn it into a world, which is.
Niko: Really nuts, but that is, yeah, I'm working with who isn't, we all have to be working with AI at the moment.
But not for five and a half years. I'll tell you that though. You guys were definitely trailblazers there. It's nuts how much things move in a week or each model. Like every time the model updates, it's just oh, now they can do this. Wow.
Sean: I love that because the, yeah. The game industry has actually embraced AI for decades.
And they have. Yeah, absolutely. It's procedural generation. We used to call it. And if you play a roguelike rogue itself is the first roguelike and use procedural generation.
Niko: generation. So that is AI. Yeah, and there's a reason why game developers have jumped on this latest wave and obviously have raised huge amounts of money, like NPC creation, making, world creation faster, making asset creation faster generating video and, character design.
It's quite a lot that is possible and is being embraced by game developers. I'd say what we're looking at is.
Sean: You've had different waves over the past, almost 30 years that I've been in 29, I think we're entering what I like to call the age of personalization where within the next call it five years, when you go and play something, it might be user generated content, but then there's AI tools within it, whether it be agents, bots, the MPCs, the storyline, and everything's adapting to how you're reacting.
To that content and throw that on a UGC platform and oh, my goodness you've got the choose your own adventure of a lifetime. That's literally a game for you, but then you're ready to probably like, okay how do you monetize that when you've just given somebody everything they ever wanted and it adapts to them every single time they go in.
Niko: Yeah I will just say yes, that would be very nice. I will just say, we've been chasing as an industry personalization for the longest time and I was early Zynga and like personalization. Oh, we can do personalization now because we've got analytics. It wasn't that easy, like now it's oh, we have AI, we can do personalization.
Let's see, jury's still out. You bring a good point there.
Sean: We have a fantastic analytics partner in dive and they have. Absolutely enabled us to look at these things around like AI and personalize a lot of the content so we can see everything down to what items and objects to people build with the most what are the most successful titles and why, and then you can cross reference the different pieces like, oh, if you spend at least this much time and use This many items and these are the items that you're using, it will have a popularity index of X and a completion of 70 percent plus adds to this.
So that's, I did want to call them out. I think dive has been a fantastic partner through the entire thing and a lot of the decisions that we've made have been because. They have such great advanced analytics that even somebody like me can use.
Niko: That means the kids definitely can use it because they are way ahead in tech then definitely then that's oldies here yeah, you mentioned dive you mentioned analytics I think one of the things I wanted to ask you about is, you know What kind of tools are you providing the creators who are putting out these worlds?
They don't have the capabilities to build their own analytics stack They're not zynga early zynga, which was like one of our pioneers in building analytics Now, of course you can get analytics off the shelf and that's exactly as it should be Game developers focus on game development, do what you're good at and then have other people who are good at analytics or attribution or whatever be part of the stack.
How are you approaching that for your creators who of course are much younger? They're children.
Sean: Yeah. For the most part, we just expose a little bit of the dive data to them, like how many people have played, how many completions how many likes, favorites, people saving it to their account, all that kind of stuff.
But on the Hiber 3D side of the stack dives, one of our partners. So if somebody goes and wants to build something on there, they can get dive out of the box as well as, other partners that we have. So like Google cloud, if you want to actually run your stuff on our side, you can, if you want to run it on your own, you can, but there's a bunch of partners that we're starting to spin up.
That you'll be able to build that ecosystem around whatever you need in a self service capacity. And then if you're one of the larger companies, obviously we have that stuff running. So it's tell us if you want it or not. If you want to go back to the Zynga days, I would also blame Zynga for changing what we used to have.
It used to be called players and then people became users. Evil internet people came in
Niko: Every company that I've been involved with or founded, co founded since since 2013, when I left that's the one thing that we've, uh, very clearly said, we are not going to call them. We're not going to call them users.
We're going to call them either players or customers or subscribers or students, depending on what the product is, what we're working on, like what is the most appropriate way to be respectful to who is essentially, Paying your bills, assuming you're making money, of course. So yes, no, a hundred percent.
And even while we were there, I think we, there was a little bit of a user, is that the right term?
Sean: Imagine you come from six to seven years of dealing with MMO games and. Everyone's talking about internet addiction and then using the word a user like, Oh, come on.
Niko: Yes. But by the way, that brings me to the next question, which is ironic because this was not planned.
This little segue into users user generated content, UGC. I'm just going to call it out. That is. That is part of the terminology. Now, nobody calls it anything other than UGC. You don't call it PGC or DGC developer creator generated. Yeah, exactly. So let's talk about UGC user generated content.
Maybe we should come up with a different name and try to, petition the industry to, to change it. You think you and I, Sean, can we get this going with a little support generated content, customer generated content? Thank you. Okay. So CGC, we're calling a CGC for the purpose of this episode, at least.
A lot of game developers talk about that. It's like I said, at the intro level, it's hot. Everybody's talking about it. It, unlike the metaverse, especially the broader metaverse concept that's fallen by the wayside, but UGC very much is still in the, growing in importance, I think, and most developers are incorporating it if it makes sense for their titles and genres.
And of course, Roblox doing a phenomenal job on that front. What do you what are you seeing on your side and the Hiber side? Both the 3D Hiber 3D, sorry, and then Hiber World side.
Sean: Yeah. The UGC is absolutely the place to take. It's the right place to be in. All the conversations we've had with large publishers and really big game companies over the last four or five months.
We're hearing from them that there hasn't been a conversation at the strategy level or at the sea level in a year that hasn't involved as part of the topics. So I think is a hot topic. The reason is a hot topic is because they believe it should create more engagement and is the ultimate engagement where you've invested.
Just like if you go back to LinkedIn, when it started, if you built out your LinkedIn profile and you had listed at least two or three jobs before that, I believe it was, then you are hooked. You're actually going to come back and use the platform when you build UGC at the very least, what we get is a lot of people returning to see how the community reacted to what they created.
And if you really did put a bunch of time into something, you're even going and promoting it on social media, trying to draw the people to see. What you've got, and I think that's probably one of the missed opportunities out there just because we're not a big company and a big team would be that influencers on youtube or tick tock or wherever, if they went in and built a kind of a branded world around what they talk about, what they're interested in, you could get a community to go in there and participate and interact on a pretty regular basis because It's a space where you can put dozens and dozens of people and you can actually communicate in the space.
So it's pretty cool. I could actually send over some worlds and you'd be like, wow, this is nuts.
Niko: Nice. And to, to the point about LinkedIn and, mentioning that if you, Put two jobs up there. Your magic number, like this, the North star, like this is the metric that we need to optimize for, read Hoffman.
Of course, famously is credited. I don't know if it's fairly or unfairly, but it's credited with the modern product management function, exactly these kinds of metrics where they're trying to find what that. Thing is that, and then Mark Pingus, of course, was friends with Reid Hoffman and brought that over that whole PM culture over to Zynga and the rest is history for the gaming industry, so to speak.
Do you have your version of that? What is your metric that you look for? Which is okay, if we get X, Y, and Z to happen in this period of time or whatever, then it's successful or maximizes your chances of success.
Sean: Yeah. If you can convert somebody into actually Being a creator and actually hitting that great button and making it through the publishing process, it doesn't have to be in their first session.
It could be in their 3rd or 4th session. And if they've come back for that, it's actually even better if they come back and they publish on that 3rd or 4th session because now they're got a recurring pattern and they say, Oh, okay, cool. Now I have a reason to come back. And I'll watch this. The other part is if they spend, you can earn these tokens internally called high bucks.
So that's our in game currency, but you can earn it by doing different actions, different quests and achievements, and then you can spend those in the shop. So once you've spent some money or some tokens, cause it's not actual real money. You can buy them for the most part. It's people earning them.
You can buy some pretty fun stuff. And once you have a digital item. It makes you want to come back. There's that level of loss aversion. I wanted to actually Promote a book a little bit. It's called coach how to build habit forming products by my bookshelf.
Niko: I've thumbed through it, I think two or three times now.
Sean: Fantastic book. If you want to look at how to build out those North star metrics and how to define what it is that's what we used.
Niko: That's what I look to. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No listeners. That's a great book, by the way, book recommendations. We don't usually do them. We usually do game recommendations.
But book recommendation. Could not recommend it more as well. A book called Hooked by Nir Eyal. N I R E Y A L, I believe. It's a yellow cover, I think, unless it's a new edition. I've got it. It is. Yeah. Okay. Let's talk. We're coming towards the end of our episode here of our time. I want to talk a little bit about the kind of the future.
So what is the, what does success look like for you? I was, it's great to be in the metrics and Oh, we got six and a half million worlds and, we're doing these deals. That's wonderful. It's in the moment, but what is your kind of long term vision? Where do you want to be?
Five years from now you've been in business for seven years. Okay. Let's say seven years, make it a, seven is the magic number here. So you've been in business for seven years. You've got, great growth. You've got to where you're, you're heading up into the right, clearly where you want to be in the next seven years.
Sean: I think we're in seven years. Still do not want to be a gigantic company. I think we want to be really tight and focused on what we're providing to the market. I hope that there's some huge shifts within the ecosystem where people start to realize that direct to consumer interactions important. I hope that and I'm not talking about us and specifically about it, but I hope within the industry.
Companies like Roblox do take a leadership position and say, you know what, we can go directly to consumers and maybe they become a distribution platform akin to the steam or Epic's trying to do. I think Unity, I've flabbergasted that they've never built their own version of steam. They have, 1.3 million plus monthly users of their editor. And why don't they have that? They have the ad network for distribution, but put some things there.
Niko: You need is a bit of a mess. It's a bit of a mess. We've done many deconstructs and what's going on with unity and what's wrong with their strategy and announcing price increases and then pulling them back and wiring ad networks that are just a horrible cultural fit.
We could spend many more episodes talking about that. So yeah, you are a surprise. I think most people are surprised by that. I'm surprised they don't have that steam store. Like you already have an asset store. Why not just make it so people can just list their game, publish their games right there.
Sean: Yeah, exactly. Give you a storefront stuff. And then you can have the monopolistic practices and get sued by multiple government agencies in different countries. Yeah, but you
Niko: get big first and then you're okay. And then you can deal and you can hire the high priced lawyers and it'll be years and years, but you have to worry about anything.
So don't worry, Sean, that's the playbook.
Sean: But for us, I think, we're going to go through more cycles. I think there will be probably a focus within the industry where there are fewer large format games coming out, but they have much longer tails and they have ecosystems around them that are UGC based and I think for us, it's Being an important part in that transition to the age of personalization and the UGC content that's massive CG, yeah, that's right.
Niko: CGC, we messed that one up on the first try. So we've got our work cut out. If we want the industry to adopt our, I can get my own head to do it. So that could take a thing or two.
Sean: But yeah I see that there's some big transitions happening within mobile, some of the big players within the tech industry are going to probably try and take bigger cuts of things because Oh, we're your cloud provider.
I read the other day that 83 percent I think it was of people using. Public cloud want to actually switch to private cloud.
Niko: It was I think it was Michael Dell put that out. Yeah. It was insane. That's crazy. Is that just fortune 500 companies or like, why would you want to switch to a private cloud?
Sean: It might've been, but I think people want to take their customers and their data and put it back behind some kind of a firewall, right? You don't want it out there as being used to train train AI models
Niko: I guess I don't have that lens on as a game developer. I'm just like, eh, I don't know. Like The public that's fine.
Like what we have nothing to hide. I think I feel that way too. It's like There's nothing you can hide. Somebody already knows everything about everybody. Especially with AI, especially with it. Gemini is freaky. It's like really creepy because it like, it is clearly reading my emails, even though I haven't given it permission.
It in fact, in relation to this episode, it knew something that it could only have known because it wasn't, there was no, it wasn't like a public thing. It was just a note in an email that it. Brought up in my prompt and I was like that, there's no way for you to know that. And then I asked her, how do you know this?
There's no way to know this. And it's Oh, I'm sorry. I don't know. And it doesn't, it can't tell you how it knows things. Like it's really frustrating and it's actually quite scary. And I think Google and these, especially Google should be worried because they have a reputation AI is. They don't, they're the upstart, right?
Yeah, anyway, we, we don't need to, that's a whole other episode. By the way, if you're interested in AI stuff, listen to the hard fork, the New York times podcast with Kevin Roose and Casey Newton, absolutely killer podcast. They have staked this. They're very funny as well.
They're very entertaining, but they've staked this position of covering AI in great detail. They have, they literally have like SVPs of Google coming on. They had the perplexity AI CEO and founder on they're that's the podcast for AI, by the way, if anybody's interested. So I'll check it out books.
We're plugging podcasts. What next, Sean? What next? We're not plugging the product. Yes, exactly. Our stuff's really good. We're super modest. You should check it out. If you like yeah. We'll have links in the show notes, both to Hiber World and to Hiber 3D. So don't worry about that. We'll put a link into dive as well your analytics partner.
And maybe we'll even put, I'm gonna have to remember all this stuff. I don't write these things down, but maybe we'll put in a link to a hooked or up at. Show note in the show notes, hooked by Nir Eyal, I think you had a hard work podcast. So we're going to have a whole page for page. Put the affiliate link on that too.
You might be able to get 7 percent from Amazon. The most recommendation heavy episode I think we've ever done. And it doesn't stop here because I have to ask this question because it's now my tradition for 2024, as I ask all of our guests who come on which three games are you currently playing or most excited about? And they can't be your own.
Sean: Okay. So this is a hard one because I play way too many games. I've been playing Empires and Puzzles for years, so I play that religiously every single day. Hey day, I'm level 120 gardenscapes level 2030, I think, but so that's on the mobile side and then anything that I love 70 CBD, they have this awesome platform.
It's a crypto wallets that is actually mixed with games on the show.
Niko: They're, they've actually, they're actually a sponsor, or at least they're, they were a sponsor. I think they still are of the Not Gaming Podcast. They're good guys. We had them on the show. Ben. Yeah. Ben Cousins. Ben Cousins.
Yeah. We had him on the pod. He's a great guest.
Sean: He's a great guy. And he actually introduced me to what they're doing. And then they have these playtime things where it's like, Hey, you can earn some big bitcoins from Satoshi's fraction of a Bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah, 44 percent bonus for the weekend. I'm like, okay, I'll try out some new game.
I've never played before and make a few satoshis. I got 50 bucks on my account somewhere. But, who knows? Maybe Bitcoin goes to a million.
Niko: Yeah,
Sean: That's not nothing.
Niko: Exactly. Exactly.
Sean: But then I think there's a lot of things that I like to play. Archer, Danger Phone, Is one of my favorites it's just littered with ads for misplay and other places like, are you getting paid for playing games?
Niko: But then I don't know when this podcast is actually ultimately coming out, but it's on Tuesday. So we're recording this Friday. August 30th is coming out next Tuesday, September, whatever that is. Second, I think.
Sean: Perfect. So today is for us on the podcast is the day that the new Call of Duty beta comes out.
So that that'll be up and running in about 20 minutes.
Niko: Yeah. We were joking that Sean's bandwidth may suddenly disappear when his daughter gets a hold of the the Call of Duty beta. We've made it through. I think just fine until now. So we should quit while we're ahead. That's the key.
Sean: It's all about the secondary backup. So I have a gigabit. Fiber coming into the house, but I have a 5g backup just in case. And literally my kids were burning out as my son was home until a week ago. He's off at college. Now they were burning out a terabyte in 10 days of the month. And then Cox is yeah, you're one of our biggest bandwidth pigs out there. So I was like, ah, I'll show you, I'll get secondary internet and put the kids on that.
Niko: There you go. Oh yeah. They'll appreciate that. They'll be happy about that. All all right. Listen that's all the time we have for today. Sean, thank you so much for your time.
And thank you for joining us on the Naavik Gaming Podcast. I've really enjoyed this conversation and I think it's really fascinating what you guys are doing and good luck with it all. Thank you.
Sean: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. And I love just talking about stuff in the games industry.
So if other things pop up and you're like, Hey, let's talk about this controversial topic that nobody seems to want to touch. Yeah, I've been around long enough. I probably can't get too much trouble.
Niko: And you work for a Swedish company, like they're usually pretty mellow, the Swedes.
They're super. Yeah it's, you don't have your like investor relations and your PR team. And I tried to get my old colleague Manuel Bronstein from our Zynga days together. He's the chief product officer at Roblox and just tried to get him on the show and he was game. And he, but then he had to loop in like his PR and his IR and his legal and all that.
And before you knew it, we had a 12 person thread going where they were like probing every aspect of what are you going to cover? What are you going to talk about? Oh, you can't talk about this. You gotta, and then in the end, this is by the way, how we got Joe Farrings on the show. In the end, they were like, ah, actually Manuel can't come on the show.
And I was like, are you kidding me? Like we just went back and forth for three months. So anyway, it resulted in Joe and he was a great guest and we enjoyed our conversation with game factor. So anyway, Manuel, if you're listening, I'm still wanting you back. Okay. I want you back on this pod.
Sean: And I think the key there is, I started out in investor relations and I did PR and I'm the legal guy too.
It's a, if anything goes wrong, I have to report myself to me.
Niko: So that's, there you go. That's the best way. That's the best person to report you to. Okay. This was really great, honestly, Sean. Thank you so much again for coming on the pod and yeah, best of luck with the future.
Awesome. Let's talk soon. All right. So until next time, friends feel free to send questions, guest reputations, and comments to me. My email is [email protected].
If you enjoyed today's episode, whether on YouTube or your favorite podcast app, make sure to like, subscribe, comment, or give a five-star review. And if you wanna reach out or provide feedback, shoot us a note at [email protected] or find us on Twitter and LinkedIn. Plus, if you wanna learn more about what Naavik has to offer, make sure to check out our website www.naavik.co there. You can sign up for the number one games industry newsletter, Naavik Digest, or contact us to learn about our wide-ranging consulting and advisory services.
Again, that is www.naavik.co. Thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode.
